إِنَّهَا عَلَيْهِم مُّؤْصَدَةٌ
Yet from the beginning the sūra had been speaking in the singular: alladhī jamaʿa, ʿaddadahu, yaḥsabu, mālahu, la-yunbadhanna. Now it passes to the plural.
This is not an inconsistency. The word كل (every) in the first verse is singular in wording and plural in sense; in Arabic, in structures built with kull, both a singular and a plural pronoun may be used. The sūra first used the singular according to the wording, and at the end passed to the plural according to the sense.
In respect of meaning, what follows is this: the portrait was of one man, the outcome is plural. The sūra began by describing a single person, but at the end it discloses that what it described was a type.
إنّ is the strongest particle of emphasis in Arabic. And the sentence is a nominal sentence — there is no verb. In Arabic a nominal sentence conveys fixity and continuity.
The verse, that is, does not say "it will be closed" or "it closes"; it says "it is closed over" — as a state, continuously.
The expected order would have been innahā muʾṣadatun ʿalayhim. ʿAlayhim has been brought in front of the predicate. In Arabic an element drawn forward out of its normal place gains emphasis and restriction.
So the centre of gravity of the sentence becomes not "it is closed" but "over them". The closing is announced not as a general condition but as a condition belonging to them in particular.
Root: أ-ص-د / و-ص-د. Awṣada'l-bāb — he shut the door and locked it. Al-waṣīd — the door, the threshold, the entrance of a courtyard.
The usage in the Qurʾān: "And their dog lay at the entrance with its two forelegs outstretched." (al-Kahf 18/18). The al-waṣīd here is the entrance of the cave.
The additional sense the word carries is locking. Not merely to shut; to shut and draw the bolt across it, to make it impossible to open.
A difference of variant reading. The word has been read in two ways: مُؤْصَدَة (with hamza) and مُوصَدَة (without hamza, with wāw). This arises from the assumption of two separate roots (أصد / وصد) and does not change the meaning; on both readings the word means "shut, locked". I do not give the names of the imāms of the readings, because I cannot say with certainty which reading belongs to whom.
The same expression occurs in one other place in the Qurʾān: "Over them is a fire closed in." (al-Balad 90/20). The two verses are almost the same. And Sūrat al-Balad touches on the subject of wealth as well — there a man is reported as saying "I have spent heaps of wealth" (al-Balad 90/6). This closeness between the two sūras shows that the same words are used around the same subject.
To accumulate wealth is an effort to build an enclosure. With wealth a man draws a boundary: so that the dangers outside cannot come in, so that the security inside does not leak out. Wealth is by definition a wall. The words themselves say it: treasury, strongbox, store, granary — all of them names of closed spaces.
The verse gives the same enclosure back, but turning it inside out. There are two kinds of enclosure: the enclosure that protects and the enclosure that imprisons. The only difference between them is which side of the door you are on.